Two Editions of Ravel's Piano Trio

In the early 1990s, when Ravel's works briefly emerged from copyright, the first critical editions of his piano music (from Edition Peters) opened with a brief discussion by their editor, Roger Nichols, of the delicate relationship between manuscripts and editions. Nichols's first two paragraphs end respectively: "The apparently laudable desire to go back to what the composer originally wrote needs therefore to be tempered with a certain amount of common sense," and "in the course of conversations with a number of composers of our own time, I am given overwhelmingly to understand that they would actually be angry if future editors ignored their carefully prepared printed scores and went back automatically to their original autographs for a so-called true reading" (Roger Nichols, "Ravel's Piano Music—A New Edition," in Maurice Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit [London: Edition Peters, 1991], 3).

This general philosophy has long informed critical editing, to the point that the term urtext ("original text") has tacitly come to encompass the composer's Fassung letzter Hand. The recent re-emergence of Ravel's music from a further stint in copyright has now prompted editions of his Piano Trio from Bärenreiter and Henle, both of which favor Ravel's manuscript fair copy of 1914 over the first edition of 1915. Completed in September 1914 in St-Jean-de-Luz, the manuscript shows notable variants from the first edition (published by Durand in June 1915, several months after the work's concert premiere on 28 January), particularly in the "Pantoum" second movement where it presents some different instrumental textures and one less measure on its last page. As this was the manuscript submitted by Ravel to his publisher Durand, the first edition's variants evidently result from intermediate emendation.

Henle's and Bärenreiter's editors explain their decision as having been prompted by one reported document and a pair of published ones: a set of instructions now lost, drawn up by Ravel as he was preparing to enlist in the armed services in early autumn 1914, reportedly containing details of exactly how to print his newly completed Trio in the event of his unavailability or demise; and the memoirs of Ravel's friend Alfredo Casella (the pianist at the Trio's premiere), who recalled, decades later, that Ravel "entrusted me with the correction of the proofs, as he himself was at war" (as quoted in the Henle edition, p. v; original in Alfredo Casella: Gli anni di Parigi: Dai documenti, ed. Roberto Calabretto [Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1997], 87). The Bärenreiter edition quotes a slightly variant memoir: "Ravel was very grateful to me [for the Trio's first performance] and wished me to correct the proofs of the work" (p. ix; cited from Music in My Time: The Memoirs of Alfredo Casella, trans. and ed. Spencer Norton [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955], 122). On that basis, both editions conclude that the first edition's variants from the autograph manuscript cannot reliably be regarded as authentic.

The obvious implication is noted in the Bärenreiter introduction: "Whether Casella ultimately adhered to Ravel's notes in correcting the proofs or made changes of his own can no longer be determined today" (pp. ix-x...